I was asked recently if you can take a family to Yellowstone National Park for less than $5,000, and I had to answer, “Absolutely.”
Yellowstone was the first national park ever created, and it’s magnificent.
You can

One of New York’s most celebrated restaurants is back and better than ever.I thought it could never be done. It was a sentiment shared by pretty much everyone after The River Café in Brooklyn took a devastating hit from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.The restaurant opened in 1977 aboard a riverboat that was moored t

Overview: The debut of the Park Hyatt New York in August was widely regarded as one of the most important hotel openings in America in years. Although based in Chicago, the top tier of the Hyatt Hotels portfolio has been slow to establish a presence in the United States. While the 34-unit luxury brand is well-known and highly regarded thr

A weekend vacation centered around drinking beer sure sounded like a fun idea, but I felt a little guilty about the reality of it. I couldn’t help thinking this was some harebrained plan to fulfill a dream from my college days. More importantly, I wasn’t quite sure I would survive the many rounds Brew City had to offer. T

Overview: Casa Madrona has long been considered the best hotel in Sausalito, but that wasn’t always saying much. Built in 1885 as a lavish private residence for William Barrett of San Francisco’s Gas and Electric Co., the property was flipped into a bed-and-breakfast merely 11 years later, the first of several reincarnations a

Sausalito’s moment has arrived.
Although it has always been a popular destination for travelers to the Bay Area, the quaint town just north of the Golden Gate Bridge was never a place that sprang to mind for the well-traveled foodie planning a weekend getaway, where dining was the ultimate goal. San Francisco? The answer was always

Overview: Last month in downtown Los Angeles, Marriott introduced a co-branded, 24-story Courtyard and Residence Inn hotel. This is Marriott’s first co-branded property on the West Coast. The first such dual-flagged hotel opened in New York in December. Although the hotel is branded with two logos, they share a common lobby and fron

Overview: The Hotel Normandie opened in 1926 as a residence hotel for single men. It was apparently quite the social scene back then, if not exactly high glamor. But a lot changed in this neighborhood, now better known as Koreatown. The hotel stopped being a real hotel long ago. It even became, temporarily, a hotel for medical marijuana p

I’ve taken my kids to five continents on a single mom’s tight budget, scrimping all the way. Here are my best tips for how to do it without going broke:
1. Take red-eye flights. Red-eyes that fly overnight are nearly always cheaper because people don’t like them. But guess what? They’re better for the kids

This is a marvelous time of year to visit Seattle and its environs, when the weather is more likely to be warm and sunny, and locals are out in force, enjoying their brief respite from the gloom with smiles on their faces.
Whether you’re getting ready to board a cruise ship, vacationing with the family or applying for a job at Micr

San Francisco is in the midst of another boom. But this isn’t simply another tech boom. It’s a restaurant boom, the likes of which the city hasn’t seen since the original dot-com rush of the 1990s.
Probably the most important restaurant to emerge in the past couple of years is Saison, whose chef and owner, Joshua Skenes

Overview: The Los Angeles-based Viceroy Hotel Group opened its first Bay Area property, the 116-room Hotel Zetta, last fall and it instantly became the darling of tech-savvy hipsters in SoMa. That’s no easy feat given the hometown love this city already feels for Kimpton, which owns several worthy competitors in the same neighborhoo

Overview: The Sydell Group (the company that developed the Saguaro Palm Springs, the Nomad in New York, and the Freehand in Miami) brings together local artists, designers (Sean Knibb), craftsmen and culinary talent (Roy Choi) to transform a rundown 12-story, 383-room Radisson in Koreatown into the Line, a trendy urban boutique hotel with

Overview: The Portland-based Ace Hotel chain (with locations in Palm Springs, New York and London) recently expanded to downtown Los Angeles with its long-awaited conversion of the 13-story United Artists building and adjoining Broadway Theatre, both originally built in the 1920s.
The Location: Downtown’s vintage thea